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Hail to the Minivan, Dowdy but Not Out

For 2014, 30th anniversary editions of the Dodge Grand Caravan, left, and Chrysler Town & Country.

THE minivan was a cliché almost from the moment the first Dodge Caravan rolled off Chrysler’s assembly line in 1983. It was the boxy family hauler aimed at harried soccer moms, a symbol of the soul-crushing conformity that was the price Americans paid for suburban comfort.

As the vehicle enters its fourth decade, we can add some new clichés. It is the Rodney Dangerfield of the automotive world, whose 15 minutes of fame may be over but whose demise has been greatly exaggerated.

Admittedly, these are not the best of times for the minivan, whose sales have declined from a peak in 2000, when Americans bought 1.37 million of the snub-nosed parent traps, close to 8 percent of new-car sales. Then, buyers could choose from at least 21 models, according to Motorintelligence.com, which tracks the industry.

This year, industry experts expect sales to drop below 500,000, about 3.5 percent of the market. It is also a much thinner market, as four vehicles — the Honda Odyssey, Toyota Sienna, Dodge Caravan and Chrysler Town & Country — account for almost all sales.

It has gotten so bad that last year, when Ford introduced its sure-as-heck-looks-like-a-minivan, the Transit Connect Wagon, it was at pains to deny its lineage. “It’s anything but a minivan,” said David Mondragon, Ford’s general manager for United States marketing. “In our mind, it’s a people mover.”

Still, these are not the worst of times for the minivan, which seems unlikely to suffer the fate of the classic wood-paneled station wagon or the Edsel.

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The 1984 Dodge Caravan.

“People have been writing about the ‘death of the minivan’ for a long time,” said Jessica Caldwell, a senior analyst at Edmunds.com. “No one should expect a return to the glory days, but sales seem to have bottomed out, and it looks like it has found its niche as an enduring option in the marketplace.”

Now, then, is the right time not to bury the minivan but to praise it. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but a minivan has never been just a minivan. Like muscle cars and sport utility vehicles, it has also been a powerful symbol and a metaphor, of hopes and dreams, as well as compromises and disappointments. Its history is inextricably braided to major social and economic trends as well as to gender politics that have reshaped America since the 1980s.

The minivan’s family tree has many roots, including the Stout Scarab, a poor-selling vehicle introduced in the early 1930s that had many minivan characteristics, and the Ford Econoline cargo van, introduced in 1961. Its most interesting antecedents are two vehicles that embodied the culture wars of the 1960s: the Volkswagen bus embraced by counterculture hippies and station wagons, which represented the conformist “Father Knows Best” mentality of postwar America. In a delicious, we-all-end-up-like-our-parents twist, some of those aging flower children would help feed the minivan boom.

The minivan was born a legend, the vehicle that saved Chrysler and helped make its chief executive at the time, Lee Iacocca, a star. The carmaker was largely being kept afloat through loan guarantees from the government when Mr. Iacocca took its helm in 1979. In 1983, it introduced the Dodge Caravan and the Plymouth Voyager. They were instant hits: Chrysler sold 209,895 minivans during the first year, turning around the company’s fortunes. GM introduced its own minivans in 1985 (the Chevrolet Astro and GMC Safari), and Ford followed in 1986, with the Aerostar.

“The minivan was revolutionary in many ways because it was one of the first vehicles designed from the inside out,” said Alexander Edwards, president of Strategic Vision, a San Diego market research firm that does work for the car industry. “It didn’t have much under the hood, and its outward appearance was anything but stylish, but the interior space of the vehicle was designed to provide space and comfort that the main family vehicle at the time, the station wagon, didn’t.”

Instead of forcing the smallest children to pile into cargo space without safety restraints, the minivan provided a third row of seats. It was low to the ground and provided a sliding door so children could get in and out of it easily, even in tight parking spaces. Through the years, minivans evolved to provide ever more home-style comfort, essentially becoming living rooms on wheels. Cup holders, juice box holders, dual zone temperature controls, wireless headphones, DVD players, televisions, iPod controls, heated steering wheels, umbrella holders and vacuums were just some of the accessories added.

Mr. Edwards said the minivan’s focus on the interior reflected a change in car culture. “Car buyers in the 1960s and ’70s knew a lot more about cars, their inner workings, than people in the late 1980s and 1990s, so it was natural for consumers to focus more on what they knew.”

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The not-a-minivan 2014 Ford Transit Connect Wagon.Credit
Ford Motor

The minivan’s bigger-is-better, having-it-all ethos reflected the swelling prosperity enjoyed by many Americans. It is no coincidence that the minivan debuted just as the stock markets were embarking on a historic bull market, when inflation was tamed, interest rates reduced and unemployment began dropping to record lows. It was an era symbolized by McMansions and supersize meals and the growth of independent after-school sports leagues that turned parents into chauffeurs.

But the ultimate domestic vehicle was soon cast as a symbol of shackled domesticity, with the “minivan stigma” attached to soccer moms who, it was said, so closely identified with the vehicles that they surrendered their identity, their autonomy, to the demands of family and suburban life. A 1997 article in The New York Times captured this dynamic when it quoted Barbara J. Byer, a mother from suburban Detroit, on why she traded her minivan for an S.U.V. “I wanted to be a mom,” she said, “yet I wanted my own identity.”

“There is no denying the stigma,” admitted JoAnn Heck, director of consumer and market insight for Chrysler, which still controls about half of the minivan market.

When Kristen Howerton, a professor of psychology at Vanguard University in Costa Mesa, Calif., began writing a blog about her efforts “to keep my sense of self, my passion, as I became a mother,” she knew exactly what to call it: Rage Against the Minivan.

“The idea of the minivan encapsulated everything I was talking about,” she said in a recent phone interview. “Cars say a lot about our values and aesthetics, and the minivan is almost the perfect metaphor for being a mom — vanilla and there to serve a purpose.”

Ms. Howerton, who has four young children, is well aware of the irony that she now drives a 2006 Toyota Sienna minivan. Despite all the cultural baggage, she says, it is “very convenient.”

The minivan’s identification with women added to its stigma. Even though sales figures indicated that men, perhaps influenced by their partners, accounted for about 60 percent of new minivan sales, many of them recoiled at the idea of driving a mommy-mobile. And, despite marketing efforts to recast minivans as swagger wagons and macho-mobiles, minivans seem indelibly associated with more feminine images of family and comfort.

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The "stow 'n' go seating" in a 2005 Dodge Grand Caravan.

It is no surprise that the chrome-plated titan of rugged adventure fantasies — the S.U.V. — rose up after the minivan. It also offered lots of interior space, though not as much as the minivan. What it lacked in comfort as it bounced down the road it made up for in a high-riding design that bespoke power and security, which appealed to men and women. It is hard to find anyone in the car business who argues that S.U.V.’s are more practical or functional vehicles for what buyers actually want their vehicles to do. But in the complex world of cultural signifiers, S.U.V.’s clicked. Through August of this year, the S.U.V./sport wagon market was about 10 times as large as the minivan’s, according to Motorintelligence.com.

In terms of median age (around 50), income (about $91,000 a year) and marital status (married), buyers of minivans and S.U.V.’s have long been peas in a pod. About two-thirds of the buyers of new minivans and S.U.V.’s tend to vote Republican, said Mr. Edwards of Strategic Vision, which surveys 500,000 new car buyers each year. (By a two-to-one ratio, buyers of new hybrid vehicles are Democrats).

Within this relatively homogeneous pool, Mr. Edwards said, there are notable lifestyle differences. People who buy minivans are much more likely to say they attend church than those who purchase S.U.V.’s. They are more likely to list family gatherings, reading and volunteering as favorite pastimes, while S.U.V. buyers are more likely to enjoy camping trips, hunting, going to sporting events and home repair projects.

“Generally speaking,” Mr. Edwards said, “people who buy minivans are saying family is at the center of their lives, and S.U.V. buyers are saying, ‘I am more than family-oriented. I am more capable, sporty and fun.’ ”

Not everyone has accepted the minivan stigma. Dempsey Bowling, a 43-year-old Dodge and Chrysler salesman in American Fork, Utah, spent years modifying his turbocharged 1989 Dodge Caravan for track and street racing.

“I used to drive around, see someone at a stop light and give them the sign that I wanted to race,” he said. “People at first would not take it seriously.” When they revved the throttle, he knew they had accepted the challenge. “I loved the way the engine would respond. Once the light turned green, the other car would take off, but I would have to get halfway through the intersection before I got a turbo boost spike, the tires would start spinning and I’d be gone.”

The adage that children express their individuality by rejecting their parents’ choices may be the minivan’s last, best hope. “When the millennials who grew up in S.U.V.’s start having families of their own, they probably won’t want the same cars their parents had,” said Ms. Caldwell of Edmunds.com. “To express their individuality, they may opt for a minivan, or even a station wagon.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 30, 2013, on page F1 of the New York edition with the headline: Hail to the Minivan, Dowdy but Not Out. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe